Michel Aflaq was Born in Damascus
to a middle class Greek OrthodoxChristian
family, Aflaq was first educated in the westernized schools of French mandate Syria, where he was
considered a "brilliant student". He then went to university at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Upon returning to the Middle East,
Aflaq became a school teacher and was active in political circles. In September
1940, after France's defeat
in World War II,
Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar set up the nucleus of what was later to
become the Ba’ath Party.
The first conference of the Ba’ath Party (in full,
the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party), was to be in 1947.

In 1949, Aflaq served as Syria's education minister for a short period. In 1952,
he left Syria, escaping from the new regime, returning two
years later in 1954. Aflaq went on to play an important role in the achievement
of the unity between Syria and Egypt in 1958.

Despite being co-founder of the Ba'ath party, Michel Aflaq had little connection to the
government that took power in Syria under that name in 1963. Eventually, the
government and he had a falling out and he was forced to flee to Iraq where another Ba’ath Party
had taken power. While this party also failed to follow most of ‘Aflaq's teachings, he became a symbol for the regime of Saddam
Hussein according to whom Iraq was in fact the true Ba’athist country. In Iraq he was given a token position as head of the
party and his objections to the regime were silenced and ignored.

His Thought

During the period of study in
Sorbonne he first developed his Arab nationalist ideals, eventually attempting
to combine socialism
with the vision of a Pan-Arab nation. In his political pursuits, Aflaq became
committed to Arab unity and the freeing of the Middle East from Western colonialism.

In his writings Aflaq had been
stridently in favor of free speech and other human rights and aid for
the lower classes. He stated that the Arab nationalist state that would be
created should be a democracy. These ideals were never put in place by the
regimes that used his ideology. Most scholars see the Assad
regime in Syria and Saddam's regime in Iraq to have only employed Aflaq's
ideology as a pretense for dictatorship.

Quotes

"A day will come when the
nationalists will find themselves the only defenders of Islam. They will have
to give a special meaning to it if they want the Arab nation to have a good
reason for survival." (In memory of the Arab Prophet, 1 April, 1943)

"The connection of Islam to
Arabism is not, therefore, similar to that of any religion to any nationalism.
The Arab Christians, when their nationalism is fully awakened and when they restore
their genuine character, will recognize that Islam for them is nationalist
education in which they have to be absorbed in order to understand and love it
to the extent that they become concerned about Islam as about the most precious
thing in their Arabism. If the actual reality is still far from this wish, the
new generation of Arab Christians has a task which it should perform with
daring and detachment, sacrificing for it their pride and benefits, for there
is nothing that equals Arabism and the honor of belonging to it." (In
memory of the Arab Prophet -April, 1943)